🍁Nine Ancient Obelisks

Any internal monologues were superfluous; the shinobi simply stood for a long time with a pale face, intently watching what he saw, without looking away. Then he approached the severed head, knelt down. Gently, he ran his hand over its cheek, smoothed its hair, and closed the once bright green eyes, now withered and the color of stagnant swamp mud. He touched two fingers to his lips, then to hers. If he believed in such concepts, he would probably have decided that the universe had decreed to punish him instantly for the passionate youthful emotion he had managed to experience – now he was beginning to understand what it was.
Having captured her last moment on the darkest shelf of his memory, he rose and turned away. His blood turned to ice, and a sudden gust of wind raised goosebumps on his exposed stomach – but not a shiver.
"What a freezer," the first conscious thought came to him.

Pulling his jacket tighter around him, he methodically and calmly examined the scene, the shape of the cuts, the approaches and exits to this area, and everything else that came to mind, trying to imagine the sequence of events, perhaps the type of weapon that could have been used, and where his own, future victim might have gone, in whose stomach he would slowly and deliberately twist the katana.